Email remains a widely popular form of communication over the internet, but email can still be very dangerous. As one of the biggest enterprise email providers, Microsoft needs to be on top of their email protection. Office 365 has Exchange Online Protection (EOP) which does a good job of protecting users, but some threats need more. Today Microsoft has announced Exchange Online Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) which will provide customers the most advanced email protection.
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) focuses on malicious email attachments and URLs. To screen attachments Microsoft passes the email into a virtualized environment to scan and assess the threat level. Attachments which are unknown will get this treatment, but known attachments will pass through to users inboxes like usual. Testing URLs can be difficult because sometimes the links are not malicious, but users could visit a safe link which redirects to a malicious site. ATP will deliver real time protection to keep users safe even after clicking links within their emails. Hopefully this new technology will be another tool used by companies to further deter hacking. ATP is currently in private preview, and will be available for $2 per user per month, $1.75 per user per month for government customers.
